


Still in My Heart

by electricshoebox



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Semi-Drabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-03
Updated: 2013-11-03
Packaged: 2017-12-31 08:32:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1029553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/electricshoebox/pseuds/electricshoebox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Each morning he wakes still expecting to find her there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Still in My Heart

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure why I keep using dreams in the things I write about Nate and Velanna, but I came across the song "Still Here" by Digital Daggers, and I had to write this immediately. Just a rough little thing, taking place after Velanna disappears. It is canon in the Uprising universe, but it can be read entirely separately.

It takes nine hundred and fifty-seven days before he stops dreaming of her. He counts them on a piece of ripped paper she left behind, dropped carelessly to the floor. When he finds it first, he casts it to her desk without another thought. Hours later he sits in her chair and flips it over and over, willing each time for words to appear across it, for ink to spill at last over the blank space and say something, anything, to tell him _why_. That night, like every night since, he dreams of waking to her arms and her skin and her hair. He dreams of clutching her close until she grumbles and squirms, chiding him for acting so childish. Her voice is in his ears when he wakes, but the bed is empty.

He thinks at first to count the days until they find her, because it gives him something to hope for. He takes one of the quills she left behind and scratches a line in the corner of the paper. But by the time a forest of little lines covers the page, they count only the days until she no longer haunts his bed. 

He waits ninety-eight days for letters that never come. He spends far longer in the forest and in the Deep and in every city and town he borrows the time to reach, scouring over the land and under it for any sign she passed near. But like the phantom whispering in his dreams and moving through their room before he wakes, he finds only emptiness, only the mist of cold, silent mornings and long, dark nights.

At three hundred and forty days, they plant a tree in the courtyard, though the earth holds nothing beneath it. None of them know the Dalish rites of remembrance, so they stand in a circle around it, heads bowed, and try to recite memories of her. He wonders if she would be proud that he does not weep.

At five hundred and ninety days he tries to plant a garden in the corner of the Keep, a small thing that might be his own memorial. At six hundred and eighteen days, the seeds sit choked and still in the ground and he gives up, trying not to think of it as a metaphor. He tries instead to remember what her laughter sounded like, and dreams that night that she sits beside the plot with magic in her fingers, raising the plants from the dirt. 

When six hundred and forty-four days pass, he stares at her robes still hanging in the wardrobe and thinks perhaps it is madness, keeping her things. He tells himself it is no shrine, nothing so heavy, nothing so strange, but he cannot bring himself to move them. He lets the robes collect dust and leaves her trunk locked. He dreams that she doesn't believe him when he promises they sit untouched.

Then, at nine hundred and fifty-seven days, he dreams of darkspawn again. He wonders--and hates that he wonders--if this dream might not be about her too. When he wakes, the space on the bed beside him feels colder than ever before. He begs the Commander for one last chance, and the frown he receives is heavy enough to bow his head. Once more and no more, he swears, vows, nods, and when he stands, the ache in his heart nearly buckles him. 

When he leaves, he casts the paper onto her desk and does not look back. 

 


End file.
